CategoryInterfaces

April 7, 2015 — What if we had an opportunity to write visual tests for responsive websites? What if we could describe the look and feel of an application and put this directly into our tests? Ivan Shubin decided to look at another interesting side of visual testing. For the last seven years, his main focus has been testing automation for a big enterprise project. Over time, Ivan became obsessed with the idea of applying automated testing using the TDD methodology to the look and feel of responsive websites. In this article, he’ll describe this experiment in detail and propose TDD as a methodology for front-end development. He will look at the new visual testing technique and examine how to get the most out of it. Read more…

December 11, 2013 — The psychological dimension that springs from a dialogue between two strategic conceptions that depend on the personality of each chess player has long been a mystery. How do Grandmasters think? The most successful strategies are rooted in our very own nature. And common to most Grandmasters is that they almost never take the easy way out. That creativity, that compulsion to look beyond what comes instinctively is what fuels successful strategies and explains why so few Grandmasters are out there. Read more…

November 19, 2013 — The best thing any designer can do is to collect feedback from real users. Recently, Joshua Gross had an opportunity to experience thiswhen iterating on HelloSign. Thanks to testing, the app went from four stars to a solid five stars after a redesign. You’ll look at how the app started, how they ran the tests and how the product ended up with five stars. Read more…

June 24, 2013 — One way to gauge mobile experience is to look at the tools at our disposal. Prototyping tools enable us to build wireframes and click-dummies. We seem to be in a better position than ever to design great experiences in virtually no time. However, these tools come with a hidden cost: they tempt us to skip the key step necessary to creating a well-designed product — which is to take the time to understand the problem we are given. Read more…

May 24, 2013 — If you are a mobile UI or UX designer, you probably remember the launch of Apple’s first iPhone. It introduced a completely touchscreen-centered interaction to a individual’s most private and personal device. It was a game-changer. Today, kids grow up with touchscreens, and touch and gesture interactions have a lot of potential to make mobile experiences easier and more fun to use. Read more…

May 13, 2013 — We have conceptualized different uses of multiple screens to tell stories. All of us, from every corner of the globe, have intensely rich cultures filled with stories and fables. Using them to create interactive narratives is another way to explore the power of the Web, to wow people, and to record our cultural history. Read more…

March 1, 2013 — Probably the most famous interface in sci-fi is gestural — the precog scrubber interface in Minority Report. This is one of the most memorable things in a movie that is crowded with future technologies, and it is one of the most referenced interfaces in cinematic history. By using it, detective John Anderton rushes to the scene of a future crime to prevent it and arrest the would-be perpetrator. Read more…

December 4, 2012 — The difficulty faced by interaction designers and user experience designers is that they have to consider, balance and combine measurable and non-measurable dimensions of user experience to create the best possible product. Fitts’s Law tries to help user interface designers by giving them easily quantifiable, mathematically accurate values to base their design decisions on. Read more…

December 20, 2011 — Microsoft’s new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7 (WP7), introduces a fresh approach to content organization and a different UX, based on the Metro design language and principles that will be incorporated into Windows 8. Read more…

November 8, 2011 — In this article, we’ll provide guidelines that have been crafted from usability testing and actual complaints made to customer support personnel by disgruntled users. Read more…